Related papers: Structural Landscapes in Geometrically Frustrated …
My model, it has three layers, Three layers is nematic. And had it just two layers, it would be a smectic. We study a reduced model of the smectic transition in two dimensions where the particles occupy three equally spaced layers. The role…
Frustration is a powerful mechanism in condensed matter systems, driving both order and co plexity. In smectics, the frustration between macroscopic chirality and equally spaced layers generates textures characterised by a proliferation of…
Geometric frustration appears in a broad range of systems, generally emerging as disordered ground configurations, thereby impeding understanding of the phenomenon's underlying mechanics. We report on a continuum system featuring locally…
The techniques which allow the numerical evaluation of the statistical properties of the potential energy landscape for models of simple liquids are reviewed and critically discussed. Expressions for the liquid free energy and its…
A variety of methods are developed for characterising the free energy landscapes of continuum, Landau-type free energy models. Using morphologies of lipid vesicles and a multistable liquid crystal device as examples, I show that the methods…
We propose a continuum model to describe the molecular alignment in thin nematic shells. By contrast with previous accounts, the two-dimensional free energy, aimed at describing the physics of thin films of nematics deposited on curved…
According to the mean-field glass theory, the (free) energy landscape of disordered systems is hierarchical and ultrametric if they belong to the full-replica-symmetry-breaking universality class. However, examining this theoretical picture…
Geometric frustration leads to complex phases of matter with exotic properties. Antiferromagnets on triangular lattices and square ice are two simple models of geometrical frustration. We map their highly degenerated ground-state phase…
Smectic liquid crystals are materials formed by stacking deformable, fluid layers. Though smectics prefer to have flat, uniformly-spaced layers, boundary conditions can impose curvature on the layers. Since the layer spacing and curvature…
Smectic order on arbitrary curved substrate can be described by a differential form of rank one (1-form), whose geometric meaning is the differential of the local phase field of the density modulation. The exterior derivative of 1-form is…
The phase-field-crystal model for liquid crystals is solved numerically in two spatial dimensions. This model is formulated with three position-dependent order parameters, namely the reduced translational density, the local nematic order…
In the free energy landscape picture of glassy systems, the slow dynamics characteristic of these systems is believed to be due to the existence of a complicated free-energy landscape with many local minima. We show here that for a…
Free-energy landscape theory is often used to describe complex molecular systems. Here, a microscopic description of water structure and dynamics based on configuration-space-networks and molecular dynamics simulations of the TIP4P/2005…
Smectic liquid crystals vividly illustrate the subtle interplay of broken translational and orientational symmetries, by exhibiting defect structures forming geometrically perfect confocal ellipses and hyperbolas. Here, we develop and…
Glasses are amorphous solids whose constituent particles are caged by their neighbors and thus cannot flow. This sluggishness is often ascribed to the free energy landscape containing multiple minima (basins) separated by high barriers.…
The dynamics of active smectic liquid crystals confined on a spherical surface is explored through an active phase field crystal model. Starting from an initially randomly perturbed isotropic phase, several types of topological defects are…
Given recipe of qualitative, kinetic modelling by geometric methods of three-dimensional dendritic crystals. Characteristic features of the perturbations appearing on the surface of a spherical body, leading to different scenarios of the…
A coupled phase-field and hydrodynamic model is introduced to describe a two-phase, weakly compressible smectic (layered phase) in contact with an isotropic fluid of different density. A non-conserved smectic order parameter is coupled to a…
The contribution of the smectic-nematic interface to the surface energy of a nematic liquid crystal sample is analyzed. By means of a simple model it is shown that the surface energy depends on the thickness of the region over which the…
We calculate the statistical properties of the energy landscape of a minimal model for strong network-forming liquids. Dynamics and thermodynamic properties of this model can be computed with arbitrary precision even at low temperatures. A…